


Three Options (no choices)

by nightwalker



Category: Real Ghostbusters
Genre: Angst, Apocalypse, End of the World, Gen, Survival, Team, Zombies
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-02-03
Updated: 2012-02-03
Packaged: 2017-10-30 13:11:23
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,403
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/332079
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nightwalker/pseuds/nightwalker
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Winston had a very practical application to survival situations, which was that if you were too busy to think, you were too busy to panic.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Three Options (no choices)

**Author's Note:**

> Warning: General apocalypse themes. Implied (offscreen) character death. I maintain that everyone survives and they eventually get reunited, but I leave it up to you if you want to interpret the end another way.

The kids had taken to calling it the horde and Peter figured that was better than anything he could come up with. Nicely ominous, appropriately descriptive. What else could you call it anyway? The group? The crowd? It sounded too normal. Calling them the horde made it easier to dehumanize them, and right now they needed that. 

Peter stood at the edge of the roof and stared down at the moaning, shuffling horde. No one wanted to think of those things as people.

"You're starting to worry me, man." Winston's voice at his back surprised him and he didn't catch himself in time to avoid jumping. Nerves. 

"I'm not going to jump," Peter said. 

"That's not what's worrying me," Winston told him. 

His teammate stepped up beside him and stood there looking down at the horde, arms crossed over his chest. His face was sad, but calm. If Winston was on the brink of emotional collapse, he sure as hell wasn't going to let on. Not with a dorm full of kids looking up to them for survival.

For just about the first time in his life, Peter found he didn't like being looked up to. These poor, stupid kids hadn't figured out they were making this shit up as they went along, but they would eventually.

"We're running out of food already," Peter said. "So we have three options."

"Get more; leave; stay here and die of starvation," Winston summarized.

"You called it."

"There's a dining hall, I assume."

"Yeah." 

They both fell silent and stared out over the crowd at the city beyond the edge of campus. There was smoke rising in billowing plumes from a number of fires, one or two of them worrisomely large. But no more sirens. They hadn't heard any sirens since the third day.

"If the military had regained control of the city, they'd have come here already," Winston said. "Columbia is full of kids. They'd be here looking for survivors. We'd at least have seen the choppers searching."

Which meant the city was still chaos. Before the power had gone out a couple days ago the reporter – out of Philadelphia, New York stations had stopped broadcasting by then – had told of military quarantines set up around the city. They had all heard and seen the explosions as the bridges were destroyed. People trying to leave the city were being shot on sight. Or had been, up to two days ago.

"Well, I hear starving to death sucks," Peter offered. "I read a study, when I was still a student here." 

Winston made a sound that might have been amused. Might have just been him rolling his eyes at the college boy – he did that sometimes. "I've heard that, too."

"So what next?"

Winston shrugged. "What else can we do? I'll get a couple of volunteers together, raid the dining hall."

"That won't last forever."

"Doesn't have to. We can't stay here forever." Winston crossed his arms over his chest. "But there were how many thousands of students here? And we've got less than thirty survivors in this entire building. There should be enough for a little while."

"I want to get back to the firehouse," Peter said quietly.

Winston wrapped an arm over his shoulders. "I know. Me too. We can't leave these kids without making sure they're okay."

He was right, which sucked because it meant Peter couldn't even get mad at him about it. "Are you sure you know what you're doing, going out there?"

The arm around his shoulders tightened into a brief, one-armed hug and Winston chuckled. "Pete, those damned things may be the walking dead but they're still not half as scary as the Viet Cong."

Right, right. Real life experiences. Christ, it was easy to forget how many of those Winston had before he'd ever met the rest of the Ghostbusters. "Sign me up."

"Yeah," Winston said, drawing the word out like a wince. "No offense, Pete, but you're not ever going to be my first choice for a stealth mission." He clapped Peter on the shoulder, a grin belying the words, because they'd been each other's first choice a thousand times before and would be again. "Someone needs to stay with the kids. Most of them are five seconds away from panicking."

Less than thirty kids – twenty-seven, at last count, and one school administrator – were all that they had managed to save, but considering how fast it had all gone to shit, Peter couldn't even take it as a failure. Having two Ghostbusters ostensibly in charge helped keep things calm so far; Peter and Winston just acted like they knew what the hell they were doing and for the most part everyone seemed content to believe them. 

There should have been four Ghosbusters, but they'd taken separate cars because Peter wanted to get there early for a change and press the flesh. After demons and vengeful spirits and monsters, it wasn't the walking dead that came between the Ghostbusters as much as the thirty damn minutes Peter had wanted to schmooze. 

"Come back in one piece," Peter said and it wasn't just to fill the silence. It was a fucking order, and Winston knew it.

* * *

The kids had jobs, because letting them sit around bored all day was an invitation to someone freaking out. Winston had a very practical application to survival situations, which was that if you were too busy to think, you were too busy to panic. Peter approved whole-heartedly, if mostly because he knew he was as close to freaking out as any of those poor kids. So they had guard duty and cleaning duty and barricade duty. Kids took turns flipping stations on their sole battery-powered radio, writing down any information that could be important to have. Most of it was busywork, but it did the job. There was even latrine duty, extra shifts of which Winston handed out as punishments for kids who shirked or started fights or spent too much time talking about how they were all doomed. Nothing made you feel quite so alive as scrubbing toilets.

Scouting was new, though and they got more volunteers than Peter had thought likely. Maybe the kids were too smart for their own good, he acknowledged. He wasn't the only one who'd figured out they couldn't live like this for long without making some serious changes.

Winston took three kids with him, a girl from the tennis team, a guy from the baseball team and a kid who'd been on scholarship and had work-study in the dining hall. The first two were muscle, with the upper-body strength to swing a baseball bat hard enough to cave in a skull. The third was their guide. They each wore an empty backpack and Winston and the guide carried duffels. If this trip was successful they could go back with a cart or wagon, get even more. 

It was Peter who laid down the law. "You don't fuck around," he told the three kids in a cold, even voice that probably did nothing to hide the fact that he was scared for all of them. "You follow orders. You do what Winston says. If he goes down, you retreat. If you get infected, you tell someone."

There weren't a lot of rules these days. Be smart. Don't fuck up. Don't get infected.

* * *

The plan was simple and reasonably solid. Winston's team leaves by the side entrance while Peter and the rest of the kids make a fuss on the opposite side of the building. Winston's team makes their way – hopefully – unobserved to the dining hall where they assess their supplies and bring back as much as they can carry. Upon return the dormitory they evaluate and plan a return trip to restock.

And once the kids are in good shape for a while, Peter and Winston would leave to make their way to the firehouse and – hopefully, God – find Egon and Ray and Janine.

If there's one thing Peter knows, it's that plans can and will go wrong.

Just not ever the way you're expecting them to.

* * *

Peter relieved one of the kids on guard duty and took watch because he knew he'd go stir crazy if he had to just sit and wait for Winston to get back. He took up position at the corner, where he could watch two sides of the dorm at once, and watched for the scout team to return.

They kept lookout for other things, too – threatening activity from the horde, rescue workers, survivors, fire in nearby buildings. The first day or two after it had all hit the fan they'd spent nearly all day and night on the roof, jumping and waving at every helicopter that passed overhead. It hadn't taken long to realize no one was going to stop, but they had tried anyway until there was no one left to call out to.

The other kid on watch that night was a girl named Gretchen. She was on the tiny side, with shoulder-length blonde hair and blue eyes. Cute, in an introverted kind of way. But she had eyes like a cat and she ended up on night watch more often than not. She was practical, too. She was one of the few survivors that hadn't been at the parapsychology seminar with Peter and Winston. They'd swept her and a couple others up on their way across campus and the others had been here already, smart enough, or afraid enough, not to leave the dorm to find out what all the screaming was about. She was a skeptic, but to her credit when she'd seen the dead were running around killing the living she'd taken a second to adjust and plowed straight ahead. 

There was probably some serious defragging in her future if she lived long enough, Peter thought with the part of his mind that wasn't calculating the minutes and hours Winston's team had been gone. Some people could have their world turn upside down and handle it. Others couldn't. He wasn't sure which she'd turn out to be when things finally evened out and she had time to sit down and think about all this.

Gretchen gave him a nod from her corner of the roof, the last bit of sunlight playing off her hair as the sun sank slowly behind the science building opposite them. The windows there were smeared with red in places, broken in others, mostly on the ground floor. Peter scanned the third floor, counting windows until he found the lab that had been Egon's favorite while they were still in school.

He didn't want to leave any of them here, in what was only temporary safety, but the odds of taking twenty-seven kids and a school administrator across the city without losing anyone were nonexistent. 

He and Winston hadn't talked about it much, but Peter knew they were both thinking it. That if they could just get back to the firehouse they'd find Egon and Ray had somehow solved this, found some way to fix it, or even better, undo it. And then they would strap on the proton packs, or whatever gizmo the brain trust had developed in their place, and they'd go out and save their city.

Save what was left of their city.

They shouldn't get their hopes up, Peter acknowledged as he skimmed his eyes over buildings and shadows lengthening along the quad. Egon and Ray might not be able to fix this and their disappointment might come across like blame. Ray in particular could be very susceptible to things like that.

Winston wasn't back yet.

They weren't long overdue, not more than an hour. No need to worry yet. 

"Sir?" Gretchen said. "What's that?"

He glanced over his shoulder to her side of the building, followed her finger as she pointed out toward the city.

Something bright and flashing, almost pulsing, and he thought of rescue workers. But this was more like lightning. Electricity. Did someone still have power?

Generators. The firehouse had three of them, all backup for the containment unit, in case the power went out for any length of time.

He thought of Winston again, and the radio he had carried with him. The twin was clipped to Peter's belt but it hadn't made a sound all evening. Not a burst of static, not a softly spoken word. He didn't dare use it in case Winston was trapped and silence was all that was saving his life. But Winston would have checked in when he reached the dining hall. 

The light on the horizon flashed brilliantly against the purple-pink sunset, bright even at that distance and Peter threw a hand up to shield his eyes. 

He heard the high-pitched whine that he'd only heard once or twice before and it froze the blood in his veins an instant before the sky was ripped apart in a fiery holocaust and a beam of light shot into the sky.

"What the hell is that?" Gretchen shouted but Peter could barely hear her over the dying echo of the explosion. 

He could hear the kids in the dorm beneath them shouting and scrambling – for cover, for weapons, for clothes, running to the windows to see what was happening, he wasn't sure what they were thinking. He wondered if Winston could see the beam of light from wherever he was, if Winston could see the forms twisting and writhing in the light as they escaped.

"Sir?" Gretchen said and she looked scared.

The horde, Peter noticed, was captivated by the lightshow and one-by-one they started to stagger away in its direction. 

"What was that?" Gretchen asked. She sounded tearful and angry and scared, but mostly confused.

"The containment unit," Peter said. He could close his eyes and still see the beam of light. And the shapes inside it – if he looked hard enough, would he recognize any of them? He'd put most of them there, after all. "The generators finally failed."

The light faded as full night fell, but they could hear shrieks and shouts rising over the city, inhuman, jubilant. Gretchen was breathing too fast; short, quick breaths that betrayed her fear. 

The dead were still staggering away from Columbia toward the source of the explosion. Soon the campus would be the safest it had been in weeks. 

The radio on his hip was still silent.

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [An Option of Last Resort](https://archiveofourown.org/works/503724) by [Omorka](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Omorka/pseuds/Omorka)




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